Nelson Algren and Chicago's war effort in 2 new films that delve into our city's past

The past can be a pest or a pain, dragging nasty memories into our heads and making us regret old decisions, activities or lovers.

But the past can also have its rewards, and a great many are to be vividly found in two very different shows available for your viewing pleasure this week.

The first is “Nelson Algren Live,” a 73-minute-long film that makes its Chicago premiere at 5 p.m. Sunday at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. (www.siskelfilmcenter.org).

Perhaps a day will come when I can escape the shadow of Algren, that distinctive Chicago literary icon/lion whom I knew as a kid and young man, who was great friends of my parents and who managed to mangle the heart of my aunt after a short love affair.

But that day has not yet and may never come, and so here is “Nelson Algren Live,” a film based on the April evening in 2009 when a bunch of people gathered on the stage of the Steppenwolf Theatre to celebrate what would have been the writer’s 100th birthday (he died in 1981) by reading from some previously unpublished Algren work in a then-new and, frankly, terrific book titled “Entrapment and Other Writings” (Seven Stories Press).

Those on stage and in the film are writers Russell Banks; Barry Gifford; Don DeLillo; and, in a mere cameo, “playing” Algren’s great pal, Studs Terkel; me; Algren’s last editor, Dan Simon, who runs Seven Stories Press; and actors Kathy Scambiatterra, Randall Newsome, Willem Dafoe and Steppenwolf’s then-artistic director Martha Lavey. The film was directed by Oscar Bucher.

The foundation of the movie is built around a series of interviews Algren gave in the early 1960s to writer H.E.F. “Shag” Donohue, later published as “Conversations with Nelson Algren.”

Algren (splendidly brought to life by Gifford, with Simon as Donohue) talks about a lot of things, and though he can flash his legendary sense of humor, he can also give us some of his equally familiar cruelty, as when he says, “My mother was a clumsy woman. I wanted a graceful mother.”

Algren fans will relish this film, which features a jazzy soundtrack and dozens of photographs by Art Shay, Algren’s great friend and companion on journeys through the city’s wild and sordid side. But even those who have never read or heard of Algren will get their kicks, none more profound than watching Dafoe become Blackie Cavanaugh, the drunken boxer at the heart and soul of a 1939 short story titled “The Lightless Room,” arguably Algren’s best, which makes it something of a masterpiece.

In a perfect Irish brogue, Dafoe delivers the sad details of a life ill-spent, with such haunting lines as “Then it was just me and the big cool dark and no wind near at all.” It is a triumph.

But there is also heartache, for those who remember that Lavey was an actress before and after heading Steppenwolf. As they watch her play Algren’s lover Simone de Beauvoir with great style, they will easily remember her untimely death — she was only 60 years old — in April and think of all that was lost with it. Tears will likely fall.

At one point in the film Algren says he thought about writing a novel about World War II but did not and that, in its way, brings us to “A City at War: Chicago,” which premieres at 8 p.m. Thursday on WTTW-Ch. 11 and on following days (https://schedule.wttw.com).

There is a great deal of information packed into this one hour, much of it embellished by rarely seen footage, used artfully. You learn of the tight relationship between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Chicago’s Mayor Ed Kelly, which enabled the city to get large government contracts to retool hundreds of companies to make war materials; of the tens of thousands of women who worked at these facilities; the city’s increasing number of wartime “diversions,” many of them mob-supplied, available to the servicemen stationed at nearby Fort Sheridan and the naval air station in Glenview; the ins and outs of rationing and the sorrowful story of internment camps; victory gardens and scrap drives; African-American contributions to the war effort; and even the formation of the All-American Girls Baseball League.

A lengthy section does a fine job detailing the work on the Manhattan Project on the campus of the University of Chicago that led, of course, to the atomic bomb and the war’s end.

The show features, as any documentary must, the requisite talking heads, but most of those here are judiciously chosen. They eschew the typical blah-blah-blah for telling anecdotes. They include novelist Mary Pat Kelly, a relative of the aforementioned mayor; Jean Mishima, who talks of the pain of having to relocate to a Japanese internment camp; sportswriter/novelist John Schulian; the city’s cultural historian, Tim Samuelson; broadcaster Marty Robinson; historians/writers Richard Lindberg, Dominic Pacyga, Perry Duis and Ethan Michaeli; writer Harry Mark Petrakis; and on and on, rewardingly.

The film is produced by the team of Brian Kallies and John Davies. They are pros and they are optimists, hoping that this show can become the first in a series exploring the scene and struggles and triumphs in other U.S. cities during WW II. I don’t know what they might find in Detroit or Los Angeles or elsewhere, but it will be hard to match the substance of this first effort.

It is narrated by Bill Kurtis, who was in the audience at a special preview here two weeks ago. Also in the crowd were some of the people featured in the film and a couple of folks old enough to have lived through the time it captured. Some walked with the aid of canes and walkers, and a few left the theater with a certain bounce in their steps and smiles on their faces, presumably because their memories had been neatly and painlessly rewarded.